The Ultimate Guide To Start Selling Adult Sex Toys Online

Is there a market for adult sex toys? Do adult toys sell? They do like crazy. The adult sex toys market is huge. Can you believe, if I say it’s a 15 billion dollar industry and growing to become a 52 billion in 2020?

The adult sex toys market is growing and people are losing their fear and trying new things. There are some pretty high tech startups in U.S that are focused on sexual wellness industry and investors are looking for a hot opportunity in that area. Even recently few luxury sex toys startups got funded with few million dollars.

How to start a sex toy business?

How’s the adult toy business like in 2016? The market is saturated with big boys and big budgets. Lots of websites have come up and they use the same drop shippers to ship the product with the prices jacked up. But, if you narrow down a micro niche or a second level sub category – there are high chances you can rule the niche to make profits.

For example – a micro niche like “ 8 inch purple double dongs or cyberskin dildos “ – these keywords are second level sub categories for Dildos and Dongs.

Target the long tail keywords – you can make a niche out of it. It is better to have a small share on the big cake rather a big share on the small cake.

Any micro niche that you select – you need to attract quality traffic. More targeted traffic = More money.

In this adult niche – as far I know – the SEO is pointless and it’s all about paying $1 and to get $1.50. Money makes money here.

If you spend $100 per day on the PPC marketing – you will get around 1000 visits on your website ( if you spend $100 on PPC for the long tail keyword – you will easily attract 1000 visitors – provided the long tail keyword has low competition and decent search volume. Finding those keywords are the gold )

So, with that traffic – the minimum conversion would be 2%. Let’s shoot an average of 3% per day – which roughly estimates $15 per sale. 30 sales per day * $15 – $450. After deductions on marketing & other expenses – you can easily make a profit of $250 per day.

One thing I learned the hard way is, never go with the FREE site that provides you a white labeled adult toy store – to be honest I don’t want to be running an affiliate site – they look like shit. There are couple of Adult toy store affiliate sites. They offer a while label solution where they will host your website, provide drop ship products which you can sell and make them money.

You will earn up to 40% commission I believe. But you don’t have the control to monetize and experiment on your website. Since everything will be hosted in their platform with pre-made template system – you cannot scale. All your marketing budget will be spend on their platform and for their drop ship products.

If you’re serious about starting an Adult toy store business – then build a powerful and scalable platform like JimmyJane.com or Femplay.

If you go with these FREE white label sites – you cannot pivot your business if you see a light at the end of the tunnel. You’re stuck with them and all your marketing expenses will be wasted ( only useful at the current month and not for a longer run ), time spend on the marketing will go into drain. Even if you want to sell your business – no serious buyer will prefer an affiliate FREE website.

You want to know why I don’t prefer these free hosted solutions?

They’re not fast, outdated technology, design looks crappy, even if they have decent designs – you’re limited to choose from 5 to 10 pre-loaded templates and most of the times when you hit the traffic – it doesn’t work.

Apparently, at the first glance these FREE sites look like a OK deal by providing with free domain, hosting the website, crappy design, product catalog, shipping etc. You can set your own prices for the products and market them. But why do you want to give them 40% of all your sales?

The other type of white label sites – I’ve seen them pricing between $175 per month and initial cost of $2400 to startup. A rough estimate for a year, you will be spending around $4500 in technology. Wow, $4500 for a dumb outdated website is too pricey.

So, I started to hunt down for a scalable eCommerce solution for my adult toy store – couldn’t find one that satisfies me on the technology stack. Most of the ones which is out there is built on some crappy platform. I couldn’t find anything solid, scalable, powerful with complete backend management for the business owner. You need to go with magenta or presta shop or open cart or some custom eCommerce solution and then customize it heavily on theme design and integrating drop shipping API or high risk merchant account for receiving payments.

Finally had to settle down on developing my own adult toy marketplace with the most sophisticated features for a sex toy business.

xMarketplace – build on a popular WordPress framework – WooCommerce and uses MySQL for database backend. To highlight – it has got all the necessary features to run a business ready adult toy store.

Plus, it has got drop shipping API and adult payment gateway integrated by default. I’ve been using this software to run my own adult toy store and now, we’re launching it as a product “xMarketplace” – turnkey software to start adult toy website.

Our main goal is to provide a complete adult turnkey white label solution for people who wants to start an Adult toy store business.

In my last couple of years researching into this niche – 99% of the adult websites looks shitty. They’re not par with the tech industry standards.

xMarketplace is a turnkey software to build your adult toy business.

Be it single vendor system or a multi vendor marketplace – you can have it all. The difference between single vendor adult toy store and multi vendor marketplace is – in Single vendor system – you’re the owner of the site & you’re the vendor too. In a multi vendor marketplace – imagine yourself as the owner of a shopping mall and you rent out the shops to multiple vendors to sell their products and you make a commission out of it.

If you’re a one man team and have few vendors – you can always start off with a single vendor system. If you have contacts with lots of small business vendors who manufacture adult sex toys, then you can convince them to sell it online through your marketplace platform.

If you have contacts to become an adult toy supplier ( may be you can directly import from china or contracts with manufacturers who produce these toys on the micro niche that you’ve selected. In Alibaba or Ali express you can find contacts of suppliers who does wholesale business )

– there is a difference between you selling a 10 dildo’s per day, instead you become the supplier and 50 people sell 10 dildo’s each day. You get a commission on each sale.

If you’re serious about this business – you’ve got hundred’s of ways to make money. xMarketplace offers complete package for your adult toy business. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a vendor at all – still you can use our drop shipping API to pull products from adult toy drop shippers and sell it.

The concept of Adult toy drop shipping and how it works is explained later in this post. As you can see, since it’s an over-saturated market with thousands of crappy sites selling adult toys, only few ( less than hundred ) are above the bar.

The major two reasons I can see is because of outdated awful design and not using a cutting edge technology to run your business. Technology is the backbone of your business, if you don’t get it right – you will find it difficult to scale big money. Obviously second important thing is marketing. As I said, you need to spend $1 to make $1.50. If you don’t follow any black hat techniques, you get to score more via organic SEO.

xMarketplace is completely SEO optimized and comes with built in Google webmaster tools like site map indexing all the product URL’s and Google analytics integration.

Talking about technology, xMarketplace is build on popular WordPress – WooCommerce platform. A huge amount of documentation and community is available for support.

Tips to Choose your White label Adult Sex Toy Website

When choosing to setup your adult toy website – what should you look for in a product?

Scalability

Before choosing your white label turnkey adult website software, you need to make sure they’re scalable and build on a robust architecture. xMarketplace has gone through stress testing & load testing. The underlying architecture has been built by experts who have worked for Google and Amazon.

Innovation

When you’re setting up your adult sex toy store – innovation is the key to make your adult toy store stand out from the crowd. xMarketplace is built with lot of innovative features that are used by the trending adult toy stores in the world. Built by growth hacking experts – the innovative features for marketing will make your website go socially viral.

Technology

How important is technology for an eCommerce development? If you have a strong tech platform – everything will fall into place. You get a grip on the supply chain, marketing activities etc.

Mobile compatible

Do you know the mobile traffic has surpassed the desktop traffic of most big players in the eCommerce market. The mobile consumers are growing and even the top adult tube sites like Pornhub has its own Android app. xMarketplace is fully responsive and mobile compatible. Now your adult toy store can be accessed from any mobile device.

SEO Optimized

SEO plays a major role for eCommerce sites. When it comes to adult toy stores – Adult SEO needs to be taken care of. xMarketplace has been SEO optimized for each and every product. It has its own field to enter product meta title, description and keyword. It comes with built in Google webmaster console integration, Sitemap.xml generator and Google analytics integration.

Support & Cost

How much will it cost to build an Adult sex toy eCommerce website ?

With all these major features mentioned above, the cost to build such a project will range from $8K to $12000 USD and 2 months of time. But xMarketplace is business ready and can be up & running in 20 minutes. We’ve spent around $15K to develop this whole platform ( web and mobile apps ) and providing this complete package as a turnkey software product at a reasonable price. The support is available 24×7 ( through phone and emails. )

Next to technology, the most important part is marketing and bringing in targeted traffic to your adult toy website.

How to get targeted traffic to your Adult toy store?

The marketing strategy for adult toy site –

The marketing strategy for an adult toy website should include both generic ways and innovative growth hacking methods. A perfect mix of both will yield high ROI.

One of the most common methods to generate targeted organic traffic is by content marketing. Writing creative and controversial articles can get you some traction.

If you’re focusing on social media traffic – Twitter gives the best ROI for adult niche. Facebook doesn’t work well for this niche. Twitter’s policy explains that it prohibits sex toys promotion – but if you see the live feeds – lots of people market their toy store products.

Instead of spamming like others, you need to use little bit growth hacking techniques– setup automation tools and find out people who talk about adult toys, follow #adulttoys or without # – retweet those tweets and start a conversation from the official twitter account.

– find and use those tweets to trigger a message automatically to the users.

Then, you can automate your marketing tweets in queue and based on your target audience geo-location and timings – you can schedule these tweets. Use services like IFTTT and buffer to queue and re-fill the queue with your marketing tweets.

Try to be funny and which makes sense. Don’t believe me ? I recently read an article at motherboard vice on how teens are making thousands of dollars per month by having anonymous novelty accounts on twitter and tweeting about romance, dating advice by mixing up adult novelty tweets (affiliate). link

As I mentioned earlier in the post, adult toy niche is over saturated. If you pump in money, you can compete better and get the best ROI. If you have a decent budget for marketing – spend it on PPC campaigns.

Although Google has shown some love towards adult toys niche, there are lots of adult ad networks that gives you targeted traffic and conversions are good too. (only if you target the ads in a wise manner).

Some of the popular adult ad networks that serves well for adult toys website – Traffic junky, AdXpansion and few more. I will explain in detail about how to start PPC marketing for adult websites in another blog post. Moving on to the next traffic generating method.

Advertising or engaging into conversations on adult forums related to your niche. For example – Sites like Lovehoney has dedicated forums that discusses about adult sex toys. You can also find dedicated adult sex toys forums like dollforum.com – you can participate and become an active member in these forums – pull the traffic to your new website and also if you have little more budget – you can advertise on these forums.

Remember, people who buy porn are your target audiences and not free porn users. So plan your strategy and pick the right forum.

You can also try Media buying.

What is media buying? You’re buying traffic from different websites by purchasing an ad space on a website, sponsored posts, etc. Before getting into media buying, you need to clearly know your target audience, do your research and strategy, then start media buying, optimize your campaigns and scale the campaign to get the best ROI.

There are two sides to media buying – understanding your traffic and your offer. Here “offer” means your product ( it can be a landing page to collect leads, it can be selling digital product like ebook, it can be selling memberships or tangible items ).

Few traffic sources where you can get started:

TrafficJunky.net

AdXpansion.com

ExoClick.com

JuicyAds.com

AdBucks.com

TrafficForce.com

Ero-Advertising.com

TrafficFactory.biz

AdultModa.com

Here are some Mobile Sources:

Reporo.com

AdJizz.com

GTSMobi.com

Those are just a small handful of sources that should be more than enough for you if you are just starting out. Once you sign up and tag your credit card -you can browse through list of websites and select a website and purchase ad placements. For example – if you find a popular toy store or related site which you think can pull your targeted audience. Some ad slots will be based of CPM model and some will be CPC.

Reddit and Stumbleupon has their own NSFW section which you can use it to pull huge adult targeted traffic. Search for NSFW reddit list – you can find the compilation of entire nsfw sub-reddit’s in one page.

Promote your products, create topics and engage with the users. Write controversial blog posts related to adult toys and promote them on these sub reddits. I have seen around 20-35% of the traffic comes from reddit community.

Stumble upon has their own NSFW sections. Apart from Reddit and stumble upon you can also use Tumblr. Never expose your products directly to these kind of traffic. Redirect them through a blog post or interesting topic in your site. Usually, these traffic from stumble upon and reddit has high bounce rate and they leave quickly if you allow them to land on your product page directly.

– I use SEMRush to get the accurate results. Helps me to find out who my competitors are, the list of keywords they’re ranking for – their advertising and back linking strategy, % of traffic for each keyword and their complete strategy. It really works.

Try to partner with related website. For example if you’re selling a specific category of toys ( that’s your whole niche ), try to partner with websites that sell related toy to your niche. For example – if you find a website that reviews toy products or write adult stories and books – those audiences are your targeted traffic. You can advertise on their site or get link backs for authority.

Make partnerships and split the profits. If you find a up selling niche for your product, partner with them – split the profits.

How to make money in Adult sex toy business ?

To make some extra money – you can also sign up with adult toy store affiliate programs from lovehoney, Nice n Naughty, Simply pleasure, Sex shop 365, Esmale, Honour, adam and eve etc.

If your incoming traffic doesn’t convert for your niche product – at least you can tap them for the affiliate conversions. These sex toys affiliate programs allows you to earn up to 20% for product purchases and $10-$15 for membership sign ups.

If you’re completely dependent on drop shipping – you can use banner ads to rotate different affiliate programs.

If you see a good traction to your website – setup your own affiliate model – provide 20 to 30% on commissions – target adult webmaster to promote and get more targeted visitors. Considering your average sales per product is $30 – show them the math and pull the webmaster’s in. Also offer them $10 as sign up bonus.

Guide to Adult toy drop shipping

What is drop shipping – how does it work?

Let’s say you don’t have the inventory to sell. You start an eCommerce site – use drop ship vendors to show their products on your website. these drop ship vendors provides you their inventory that you can sell at retail price and make decent commission out of it. They take care of shipping and delivery. You just need to focus on marketing and making sales.

Adult toy drop shippers

There are few adult toy drop shippers like adultdropshipper.com, sextoydistributing.com, eldorado.net etc.

In xMarketplace, we have used one of the leading Wholesale drop shipper for adult products.

The advantage of using drop shipping service – it’s easy to scale and low over head.

You can run your business from anywhere – flexible location.

In fact, you don’t have to invest on the inventory – so low capital on the business and you’ve got wide range of products to choose your niche.

Obviously if you go with drop shipping – you will be making low margins than tie ups with direct manufacturers and wholesalers.

You need to have a trust worthy drop shipper who has invested on technology to manage the inventory stock and shipping procedures.

Also handing returns and disputes with drop ship products is a big headache. No drop shipper actually accepts for refunds or exchange of products.

How does it work? – white label adult toy drop shipping

Your customer places an order on your website and pays for the product and shipping cost. You will receive the payment in your bank account. You ( business owner ) are notified by an email and you either manually go to drop shipper website to place an order – or use their API to integrate and automate this process. Now the vendor ships the items directly to customer with your company label and packaging. Most of the adult toy drop shippers use discreet shipping.

How to make money using sex toy drop shipping?

Using their API or CSV XML upload, you pull all their products and display it on your website with 100% price mark up. As I’ve always mentioned, never ever start with all the categories, select a micro niche and try to dominate the niche and expand slowly.

Your credit card will be filed with the drop shipper or you can use PayPal to load your drop shipping account wallet – so it becomes easier for you to order the products.

All the products which are ordered will be shipped by the drop shipper in 2 days maximum.

I recommend you can bundle up Lingerie business with adult toys that should give you a decent profit. You can advertise lingerie products on wide range of websites that will attract women customer who are more interested in the adult toy products.

Amazon is killing it – the harsh reality is amazon’s sex toy market is killing all the competition. The same product that you find on a website sells at amazon at 50% lower price.

To take advantage of it, you can mix up amazon’s affiliate products into your website.

xMarketplace can be customized to build an amazon affiliate plugin that pulls all the sex toy products listed on amazon and show it on your website with your affiliate ID tagged to it.

With all these above mentioned features, xMarketplace is the right choice to start your adult toy business today. You can check out the product detail page of xMarketplace here.